About

Main Objectives

The central topic of the MOCATOUR (Mobile Cultural Access for Tourists) project is to establish computational methods to facilitate tourists with contextualised and experience-based access to information while they freely explore a city. The main goal of the project is to enable tourists to submit and share personal views in form of different media (photo, video, audio or text) to easily create complex experience representations, e.g. in form of virtual media graffiti as annotations on locations. We are in particular interested in the social aspects of such interactions, such as sharing personal opinions or impressions about particular locations and their related objects outdoors as well as indoors. Here we work on new forms of digital interactive storytelling methods, which can generate various types of stories out of the left behind experiences, no matter if the story should follow experiences of a real existing person or a fictional character. The research direction addresses the development of new human computer interaction paradigms for the capture as well as presentation of experiences in dynamic environments for contextualised city experiences. The focus on our experience research is the affect layer of experiences.
The final aim is to provide an experience structure that can easily jump from one community to another. In the context of mobile tourism we wish to develop services that can be used in Stockholm as well as in Berlin, Rome or Madrid. As part of our research we would like to test our ideas about social-networked and experienced-based city exploration in real world locations.
To increase understanding of this interaction behavior, it is important to understand ‘natural’ interaction outside the walls of the laboratory, and hence the testing and evaluation will be conducted using the Amsterdam Living Lab methodology. This aspect of research poses an important research challenge: how to extract salient elements from mobile human experience in a noisy, natural environment, especially when we still do not fully understand what experiences are, how they are formed, and why they occur as such?

Research Questions

How can we represent people’s experience so as to facilitate the presentation and sharing of those experiences?

What kinds of methods should be used to capture such experiences?

How can interactive digital storytelling be used to organize experiences left behind by different people at different places?